How Raphael Owen started their logo design journey

Company name

Overview

Aeris Solutions is a company specialising in the provision of digital signage solutions. Our current design of a battery was based on "positive energy" as a catch phrase. This has now been changed to "powering the future of digital signage" which tells our prospective clients what we do more clearly.
We are still open to the circle with the + in the middle as this has proven to be a good avatar when needed for our twitter account or similar.
We believe the battery is not relevant to our business and want to have a fresh look to carry us into 2010.
We also want to have developed this new logo into letterheads and formats we can easily implement into out website and brochures. We are also interested in discussing the creation of templates we can use for case studies and brochures we hand out to customers.
We are happy with the color we currently use, but are open to suggestions. We do not want to copy every other signage company by having a rectangular screen in the logo to denote the use of LCD screens.
We are in a technology industry which is quickly growing, we want to portray a successful company capable of delivering everything from a simple signage solution to the most complex.
The successful designer can expect additional work from Aeris as we grow our business into new markets with products which are designed for a different type of client.

Tell us a bit about who you are and the people you reach

Our main markets at this stage are Retail, Hospitality and Corporate. Whilst digital signage is growing it is still considered an emerging market. The majority of our customers are B2B so we need to demonstrate competency to these people. However we are also introducing a range of new products designed to reduce the lengthy sales cycle so want to have a look a fresh new product range which allows people to choose a solution with a few easy steps.

Requirements

Quite simply we are after a new company logo as stated. Our current design we feel is no longer appropriate. We must incorporate the term "powering the future of digital signage" into the design to let people know what we do.
We are happy to also keep the circle with the + in the middle as it is used in many locations online as our avatar, but we are not fixed to this. This should not form a major part of the design.
We want to be able to simply integrate our logo into our current website which is based on a dotnet nuke system. We also want to letterhead for invoicing and quotes and possibly a simple template design which can be used for case studies. You can learn more about what we do by looking at our website at http://www.aerissolutions.com.au Things like the case studies you will see in the Case Studies section will show you the type of information we want to convey to people. These are currently done in-house with Publisher and we want it too more professional. I have also added some of these brochures and logos to the attached files for you to look at.